Back in the dawn of time, which is four decades ago in computer science and which was before technical computing went mainstream with the advent of Unix workstations and their beefy server cousins, ...

June 21, 2007 The programming language Fortran celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, having touched the lives of millions of programmers and billions of people in the half century since. A ...

John W. Backus, who assembled and led the IBM team that created Fortran, the first widely used programming language, which helped open the door to modern computing, died Saturday at his home in ...

John Backus, who died on 17 March, was a pioneer in the early development of computer programming languages, and was subsequently a leading researcher in so-called functional programming. He spent his ...